Mayor Bloomberg said Friday that black and Latino New Yorkers are not stopped and frisked enough, while whites are stopped too much, when compared to the racial breakdown of crime suspects.
Bloomberg spent several minutes on the topic during his radio show Friday, and was making a point about how news organizations wrongly cast the debate as one about blacks and Latinos being stopped more than whites.
"They just keep saying, 'Oh it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group. That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder," Bloomberg said. "In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they say. I don’t know where they went to school but they certainly didn’t take a math course. Or a logic course."
Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have repeatedly made the point that stop and frisk rates, while higher among non-whites, generally match the racial statistics on crime suspects. But neither has quite put it the way the billionaire mayor did on Friday.
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The city says 90 percent of the city's murder suspects are black or Latino, and 87 percent of people stopped by police are black and Latino. Whites are 7 percent of suspects and 9 percent of stops.
The City Council passed two bills this week to create an independent monitor of the NYPD and also make it easier to bring racial profiling claims against the department. Bloomberg has vowed to veto the bills, but both passed with enough votes to override those vetoes.
